I don’t know this David, but fuck them.
Next time I’ll read the article before knee jerking. As it turns out, they don’t say it’s too late to act, rather that it’s too late to still count on changes from the political and economical domination structures.
Leaving the rest here because it’s still true.Climate change isn’t an on/off switch, it’s something that can always be made better or worse by increments.
Yes we’re going over 1.5°C and almost surely over 2°, world is gonna become hell for hundreds of millions of people (usually those least responsible for climate change) as it has already for dozens millions.
But we’re still better at 2.2 than 2.3. Or at 3.7 than 3.8. Or 3.0 than 3.1.
Humanity’s survival is not at stake, but the lives of countless people are. If by our action we can reduce the number of people sufdering/dying from climate change even by 0.0001%, it’s still worth the fucking fight.TLDR: never too late to go vegan, stop traveling by plane or bombing oil companies exec offices and cars.~~
Suzuki is a leading climate activist, worth learning more about. https://davidsuzuki.org/story/pipeline-blockade-is-a-sign-of-deeper-troubles/
Climate change isn’t an on/off switch, it’s something that can always be made better or worse by increments.
I’m just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.
The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.
If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that’s just because you haven’t pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you’ve never seen before.
Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it’s a one way deal.
Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.
The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That’s a done deal.
I think you’re right, but I don’t think OP would necessarily disagree (although I don’t know them).
The point is, we don’t really know where, or how many, tipping points there are. Every 0.1 degree warming is a higher chance of reaching them. And most climate models predict very different outcones for 2 degree vs 3 degree vs 4 degree warming.
So, there are a bunch of lags effects and tipping points, but we still don’t have any information to suggest that every 0.1 degree avoided has huge value.
Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.
“If we could only slow down carbon…”
The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
It’s honestly incredible that that’s his point and the headline twists it into ‘the fight is lost’. Like he’s literally saying that we need to step outside of these institutions that are designed to capture and neuter our political imagination, and instead we should use our power of direct action, and the author said, “okay but my imagination is completely captured so I interpret that to mean that the fight is lost, actually”.
Well, unless it’s an exponential kind of a thing, right?
Maybe the long term fight we can still win is ‘Can we do enough to keep the possibility that humans might become extinct over the coming centuries off the table at 2100’.
Does it matter whether humanity goes extinct? Not really, that’s isn’t the big challenge. Human suffering is.
None of it really matters all that much to me, at this point. But I am pretty sure that humankind having some sort of potentially achievable long term goal, and crucially (when it comes to trying to stop climate change) tries to fight a battle that isn’t already lost, is the only way forward.
